RealAlternative does contain the binary blobs from the official distribution, as well as the Gabest splitter for doing .rmvb via DirectShow. It works well, but it's become less popular now that Kostya has a reverse-engineered RV40 decoder in the ffmpeg trunk (and hence into mplayer, VLC et al). It's similar to the "Binary Codecs Package" that mplayer distributes (in fact, they even contain the same offending .dll's).

H.264 is pretty much superior to RV40 in every way; RealVideo is in fact based on an early incomplete draft of H.264, and it's said to contain some glaring bitstream errors that they've had to maintain compatibility with since its release, seriously hurting compression efficiency. A nice point about Real, though, is that at low bitrates RealVideo becomes heavily biased towards blurring rather than blocking, making it suitable for low-detail content (cartoons, old anime). H.264 still wins though.

One way this problem could have been avoided, would have been to release RealAlternative as a sort of downloader-patcher that acquired the official installer and extracted the necessary binaries on the fly - sort of like how Linux distributions get around the problem of mscorefonts-ttf by using that installer package